It’s been said a million times that the human battery thing makes no sense in terms of energy production. But the other huge sin the Matrix commits is having humans block out the sun so robots can’t get solar power. That is ridiculously stupid. Humans need to grow crops. I rest my case. It’s stupid. I love these movies, but that part is just plain stupid.
There’s conflicting stories about it so it’s hard to verify, but apparently the battery thing was a rewrite.
Apparently originally the people plugged into the matrix were meant to be the very hardware the matrix was run on. As in all their brains together formed a literal neural network that provided the processing power to run the matrix. This is then why knowing it’s not real and believing you can do “the impossible” within the matrix can cause you to be able to bend reality. The story goes that executives thought it was too high of a concept for audiences to grasp and demanded the change to the battery explanation to make it simpler to follow.
The fun part is that the inhabitants of Zion are, canonically, shown to have very incomplete information about the actual state of the world, their own history, how the machine civilization works.
Neo is told basically ‘we think it is the year 2XXX, but really, we have no idea’, in the first movie.
Without spoiling much… Morpheus is wrong about some things, some pretty important things.
Hell, so is the Architect and even the Oracle says that some things are beyond her ability to predict.
But anyway… its entirely possible that the battery explanation is just another thing that Morpheus, the broad understanding of Zion itself, is wrong about.
So this doesn’t actually ‘break’ the canon at all.
In fact, I’d argue that it makes the idea of ‘free your mind’ even more interesting and complex.
Even the truthseekers and truthtellers… can be wrong.
Yeah, it was changed because someone thought that the explanation scene wouldn’t work if they were holding up a CPU. They forced them to use a battery instead, forever ruining the backstory.
I’d never heard Neil Gaiman as the origin of that theory. I’d always heard it came from commentary on the DVDs myself. I just don’t own the films. But I guess that’d be the conflicting stories bit right?
I’ve heard this too, but even this has an issue. It’s circular. Why imprison humans so their brains can be used to run the matrix which is designed to imprison them?
Presumably the brain network was performing more than the task of simulation. I.E performing processing tasks for the machines. More humans = more brains = more processing headroom (ha, clever) for more machines.
i mean they kind of go into that in the movies don’t they? The machines didn’t want to completely destroy humanity. So they tried to create the matrix as “The Perfect Prison” for them. Using their own minds to create the very prison to hold them in would fit right into that wouldn’t it?
Its much… much more terrifying if you watch both parts of The Second Rennaissance from the AniMatrix.
Basically, the machines win the war against humans and then spend a century or couple just… doing all kinds of horrifying Mengele level experiments on humans, to attempt to fully understand their biology, neurology, etc…
And also, Smith gives details about the previous versions of the Matrix, in the first movie, as he is taunting Morpheus:
Agent Smith:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You’ve had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.
arguably more spoilers for this 20+ year old set of movies and what not
I believe the Architect says some things about it as well, and like, the Merovingian and his entire crew of Exiles, and Seraph… they’re all programs that were designed to be essentially monsters or angels, in older versions of the Matrix, who refused to be deleted along with a version change, and basically hide in the Matrix… an Agent would see them as an anomaly and try to destroy them.
The Matrix Online went into this kind of thing in a lot more detail, but … I think it basically mostly isn’t canon anymore. But parts of it might be. … very confusing to try to sort all that out.
Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself… /s
My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It’s also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.
It’s been said a million times that the human battery thing makes no sense in terms of energy production. But the other huge sin the Matrix commits is having humans block out the sun so robots can’t get solar power. That is ridiculously stupid. Humans need to grow crops. I rest my case. It’s stupid. I love these movies, but that part is just plain stupid.
There’s conflicting stories about it so it’s hard to verify, but apparently the battery thing was a rewrite.
Apparently originally the people plugged into the matrix were meant to be the very hardware the matrix was run on. As in all their brains together formed a literal neural network that provided the processing power to run the matrix. This is then why knowing it’s not real and believing you can do “the impossible” within the matrix can cause you to be able to bend reality. The story goes that executives thought it was too high of a concept for audiences to grasp and demanded the change to the battery explanation to make it simpler to follow.
The fun part is that the inhabitants of Zion are, canonically, shown to have very incomplete information about the actual state of the world, their own history, how the machine civilization works.
Neo is told basically ‘we think it is the year 2XXX, but really, we have no idea’, in the first movie.
Without spoiling much… Morpheus is wrong about some things, some pretty important things.
Hell, so is the Architect and even the Oracle says that some things are beyond her ability to predict.
But anyway… its entirely possible that the battery explanation is just another thing that Morpheus, the broad understanding of Zion itself, is wrong about.
So this doesn’t actually ‘break’ the canon at all.
In fact, I’d argue that it makes the idea of ‘free your mind’ even more interesting and complex.
Even the truthseekers and truthtellers… can be wrong.
Yeah, it was changed because someone thought that the explanation scene wouldn’t work if they were holding up a CPU. They forced them to use a battery instead, forever ruining the backstory.
Apparently Neil Gaiman invented that theory but it was never confirmed by the w. brothers
https://screenrant.com/matrix-resurrections-human-batteries-plot-hole-not-fix/
*W. Sisters now.
I’d never heard Neil Gaiman as the origin of that theory. I’d always heard it came from commentary on the DVDs myself. I just don’t own the films. But I guess that’d be the conflicting stories bit right?
I’ve heard this too, but even this has an issue. It’s circular. Why imprison humans so their brains can be used to run the matrix which is designed to imprison them?
Presumably the brain network was performing more than the task of simulation. I.E performing processing tasks for the machines. More humans = more brains = more processing headroom (ha, clever) for more machines.
Johnny Mnemonic got a headache after reading that joke.
i mean they kind of go into that in the movies don’t they? The machines didn’t want to completely destroy humanity. So they tried to create the matrix as “The Perfect Prison” for them. Using their own minds to create the very prison to hold them in would fit right into that wouldn’t it?
Its much… much more terrifying if you watch both parts of The Second Rennaissance from the AniMatrix.
Basically, the machines win the war against humans and then spend a century or couple just… doing all kinds of horrifying Mengele level experiments on humans, to attempt to fully understand their biology, neurology, etc…
And also, Smith gives details about the previous versions of the Matrix, in the first movie, as he is taunting Morpheus:
Agent Smith:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You’ve had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.
arguably more spoilers for this 20+ year old set of movies and what not
I believe the Architect says some things about it as well, and like, the Merovingian and his entire crew of Exiles, and Seraph… they’re all programs that were designed to be essentially monsters or angels, in older versions of the Matrix, who refused to be deleted along with a version change, and basically hide in the Matrix… an Agent would see them as an anomaly and try to destroy them.
The Matrix Online went into this kind of thing in a lot more detail, but … I think it basically mostly isn’t canon anymore. But parts of it might be. … very confusing to try to sort all that out.
the trans allegory kicks ass so we can ignore an inconsistency or two
Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself… /s
My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It’s also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.